Starting a mage
Note to editors More work is needed still, but please try to keep it relatively short; more advanced topics should go into the Mage Tactics area, or somewhere linked from there. -- Goldark 08:47, 21 Nov 2004 (EST) Introduction So, you're thinking of playing a Mage? This page is intended to give a short overview of what to do over the first 10 levels or so, just to get you started on the right path. If you're looking for more of an overview of the class's abilities, see the main mage page. For more advanced topics, see the Mage Tactics. For a more general overview on starting out playing WoW, see the Newbie Guide Race Selection If you're a power-player, you'll want to consider the various Racial Traits when choosing what race to play. Click Mage Races for an in-depth discussion of various races that can be mages. You might also consider the racial stats, but after the first 20 levels or so these become largely irrelevant, as the items you've gained will far outstrip any racial bonuses. For more casual gamers, there's really no major difference between the races - choose the race that you want to play, whether for its looks, its voice, or because its simply good fun! Moved Tach's comment to the Mage Races discussion page. -- RoJ Early Leveling The easiest way to progress through the early levels is to simply do any and all of the quests you can find. Not only will you breeze through the first 5 to 10 levels, but you'll get useful gear and precious money. Money is particulary important so you can purchase your spells. You will spend levels 1 to 5 in your starting town. Make sure you get all the abilities and spells you can from your trainer. Between level 5 and 6 you'll find yourself heading off to your second town and a new trainer who can teach you various things. At the second town, repeat the process - do each and every quest you can find. It's important to keep up with your abilities and your gear. Now is also an appropriate time to start training in your chosen professions. Notable Early Quests '' The intention is to link into the Quests page here with a few low-level quests once they are added, with particular emphasis on including quests with nice mage rewards, and any mage-specific quests. No real need to include the very basic starting quests as everybody will see those easily enough -- Goldark'' The following lists are not intended to be comprehensive, but cover a selection of the best quests in the starting areas from levels 1 to 10. Gnomes * Quest 1 * Quest 2 * etc Humans * Brotherhood of Thieves - nice early staff reward * Van Cleef - Westfall Level 22-23 This isn't an early quest, but it has an excellent reward for mages; The Staff of Westfall gives you +6 Intellect and + 11 spirit, which is a huge benefit to a level 25 mage. Night Elves * Quest 1 Orcs/Trolls * Quest 1 Undead * Quest 1 On Soloing and Grouping Soloing For the first 10 levels, the Mage shouldn't have much trouble soloing up to two mobs at a time around your level. Your primary damage comes from using Fireball and Fire Blast. Fire Blast is insta-cast, so for the best DPS you want to be using this spell whenever it's available. Frostbolt is useful as an opening move because it slows the mob down, but beware that if you cast a fire spell it will give the creep a chance to break any frost-based effects earlier then they would wear off. Always keep your buffs on. Frost Armor not only gives you more armor, but also slows down attacking mobs. Arcane Intellect boosts your Intellect, meaning you've more mana, and a higher chance to crit with damage spells. Finally, don't be afraid to use your staff to whack mobs over the head. During the early levels this can be a significant form of damage, and additionally it's good to wade into the thick of things to keep your defense skills up. As your levels progress, you'll want to make sure that you keep your weapon skills up to spec (or nearly) in the areas that you like. If you prefer to use staves, then make sure that each level, you give yourself some fights with your staff so that the skill remains fairly high. Wands may be difficult to find early in the game, but once you get one of them, use it as much as possible to bring your skills with it up. Wands have a much higher chance of missing (or "resisted") than staves do by higher level mobs, so the better your skill with it, the more chance you have of doing some damage with it. If you like to use an actual weapon, such as a dagger or sword (both of which you need to train at a Weapon Trainer), make sure you use it enough to make it worth the loss of potential bonuses that staves tend to give. Having a low weapons skill when the time comes to use it can easily result in your death. --Froderick Grouping Grouping isn't all that different from soloing. The main difference is that you'll annoy your group mates when you continually annihilate mobs before they can get more than a swing or two in! Because of that, is better just to wait a little for your tank getting aggro, and then cast just one or two nukes assisting the tank. That way you keep the aggro out and get a fast kill on mobs, letting the other group mates do their work properly too and preventing mob from fleeing away. Also, you get to keep more of your mana that way, which means less time for your group to stand around waiting or fight without you while your mana comes back. Try to conserve your magic and let the tanks do the melee work —it's what they're for. Remember to "assist" the Warrior or Paladin if you have one in your group, to ensure you focus your party's firepower on one mob. You can do this by selecting the tank (use the F1-F5 keys to target group members) and then pressing "F". This way, mobs will die faster. If you don't have a tank in the group, agree amongst yourselves who to assist. Although it's not all that important now, its an important habit to get used to for later levels. The Primary spells you will be using in a group is either a Direct Damage (DD) Spell (like Arcane Missiles or Scorch) and an Area of Effect (AoE) spell (like Arcane Explosion or Flamestrike). The DD spell will be used to focus on a single mob - usually the one the "puller" dragged to the group - since the usual group tactic is to focus on one mob and take it down fast. Your AoE spell is for when the pull went bad, or your healer picked up "hate" and has a mob pounding on him. This is the time to step in and take one for the team - spam your AoE spell to get as much "hate" for the mobs directed to yourself - freeing up the healer to focus their healing attention on you. The last "must have" spell for the mage, and which makes them unique in a group, is the crowd control spell Polymorph (or Sheeping as it is known). The spell is cast on any Add that came when the "puller" used a ranged attack to drag a mob to the party. "Sheeping" cause a mob to wonder around as a harmless sheep for a time (depending on spell level), giving the party time to deal with other mobs. Just remember that ANY damage done to the "sheep" causes the spell to be broken and you have a very angry mob coming right for you. Useful Professions The mage can benefit directly and indirectly from many of the professions available. Primary Professions * Herbalism & Alchemy : Herbalism and Alchemy are fairly useful for the mage, and are essentially two Primary Professions that go hand in hand. Herbalism allows the gathering of various herbs, and the Alchemy profession allows the creation of various potions for use. Health potions will often save your life, mana potions instantly restore some mana, and there are also potions of defense, agility, regen potions and more. * Engineering & Mining : Engineering is pretty useful for any class - but as a mage its perhaps less useful than for others. After all, you don't need dynamite with your mage spells. Best coupled with mining, as it is heavily reliant on metals. However, most engineering items require engineering to use, so you're less likely to make lots of money from this trade. (Guns are one notable exception to this) * Tailoring : A most useful mage profession! Not only can you make bags which are always popular, but you can also craft yourself your own garments. As a cloth-user, the tailoring skill will allow you to create most of the items you need to wear. * Enchanting : Enchanting just naturally seems to go with a mage, after all you are the master of the arcane. It also makes a good profession in tandem with Tailoring, as they do not rely on gathering skills. Enchanting allows you to add magical enchantments to boost the statistics of weapons and armor. However, you do need to disenchant existing magical items in order to get the magic components you'll require. This can be an expensive business! * Herbalism / Skinning / Mining : If you don't go for one of the typical pairings, you may just want to grab herbalism, skinning or mining and use them to sell resources for straight profit. Start your profession early! It's usually not too expensive, and you want to ensure that the gear you create with your skills is applicable to your character's level. Secondary Professions * Cooking * Fishing * First Aid As a mage, you can summon all the food and drink you'll ever need. This makes Cooking and Fishing fairly redundant - nevertheless, they are free though, so there's no harm in picking up the basics. All secondary professions now cost each to get so this is not as much of a deal now. Cooking has many recipes which when eaten give a Stamina and Spirit buff (more hit points and faster mana regen, both really handy for a Mage) so it may still be worth the investment. -- Dga First Aid is of some limited use to a mage, as it can really reduce your down-time between fights when soloing, and can also help reduce the strain on your healers when in a group. However, mana is more likely to be the limiting factor in your downtime, rather than health. First Aid can still be extremely useful in combat situations however: For PvE, often a mob might add on you near the end of a fight. With First Aid, you can Polymorph it, and then First Aid if you are low on health. Many Mages have found it quite invaluable in some situations. First Aid is also somewhat helpful in profit making, as you can always sell bandages that you don't need. If you invest in First Aid skills (which really take no effort and are easy to get materials for from monsters), you should generally keep a supply of about 20 bandages of your highest level. Sell everything else, as it is a decent profit for the level. After a while, when your skill in it gets high enough, you may be able to sell the raw materials to other players who need them for more profit than just making the bandages and selling them to vendors yourself. --Froderick You'd probably make more money selling the raw materials though, as the materials required for bandages are worth more to tailors for making clothes and, in particular, bags. -- Goldark Long-Term Goals Unlike a melee class, mages are not very dependent on gear. Rather, you should ensure you have enough money to afford all your spells (the teleport spells, at level 20 and then 40, are very expensive), and focus on leveling up. Mages are somewhat fortunate in that they tend to get somewhat well-endowed financially a bit quicker than a lot of other classes, although this greatly depends on your playing style. If you are in groups a lot, and lots of gear comes along that you don't use, it's generally more polite not to roll on the things you have no use for, and let others such as Warriors and Paladins take the Mail equipment. In this case, your profession will probably be a higher source of income. However, if you like to solo a lot (which is always a good thing to do at least once in a while), you'll get total pickings out of whatever monsters may be carrying on them. You can decide what to bring and what not to bring, and it may go pretty fast, since Mages tend to kill mobs faster than others (due to high damage payloads). During the downtime while you're waiting for mana and/or health to recover, it may be advantageous (depending on where you are and what you are doing) to run back to the nearest vendor to lighten your load. Also, you might get some pretty nifty items from doing your own solo work, especially if you venture bravely into Instances or Dungeons or places where high-value drops are a matter of public knowledge. This will provide you a large pool of cash to, as said above, pay for your surprisingly increasingly expensive training costs. --Froderick Decide where you want to go with your Mage Talents, as these can make a big difference to the way you'll play your mage past level 10. You may also want to consider training a 1-handed weapon such as a dagger or sword if you prefer to be able to hold an item in your off-hand too. If you find an offhand item that you really like, you should start looking for a very "slow" dagger with lots of bonuses. Many daggers have caster-related bonuses, and are relatively inexpensive compared to staves, bigger weapons, and such. The slower the dagger, the better, as it gives you more time to get spells and such in without missing potential melee attacks, which enables you to get more hits in overall.--Froderick See Mage Tactics for more advanced information on Mages, taking you beyond the first 10 levels. ---- Mage,Starting Mage,Starting